be lifted more or less.  A personage with a long, pale face, resembling the countenance of a sheep, opined, shaking his head, that it was a quarrel of long standing envenomed by time.  It was objected to him that the men themselves were too young for such a theory.  They belonged also to different and distant parts of France.  There were other physical impossibilities, too.  A sub-commissary of the Intendence, an agreeable and cultivated bachelor in kerseymere breeches, Hessian boots, and a blue coat embroidered with silver lace, who affected to believe in the transmigration of souls, suggested that the two had met perhaps in some previous existence.  The feud was in the forgotten past.  It might have been something quite inconceivable in the present state of their being; but their souls remembered the animosity, and manifested an instinctive antagonism.  He developed this theme jocularly.  Yet the affair was so absurd from the worldly, the military, the honourable, or the prudential point of view, that this weird explanation seemed rather more reasonable than any other.

The two officers had confided nothing definite to any one.  Humiliation at having been worsted arms in hand, and an uneasy feeling of having been involved in a scrape by the injustice of fate, kept Lieut.  Feraud savagely dumb.  He mistrusted the sympathy of mankind.  That would, of course, go to that dandified staff officer.  Lying in bed, he raved aloud to the pretty maid who administered to his needs with devotion, and listened to his horrible imprecations with alarm.  That Lieut.  D’Hubert should be made to “pay for it,” seemed to her just and natural.  Her principal care was that Lieut.  Feraud should not excite himself.  He appeared so wholly admirable and fascinating to the humility of her heart that her only concern was to see him get well quickly, even if it were only to resume his visits to Madame de Lionne’s salon.

Lieut.  D’Hubert kept silent for the immediate reason that there was no one, except a stupid young soldier servant, to speak to.  Further, he was aware that the episode, so grave professionally, had its comic side.  When reflecting upon it, he still felt that he would like to wring Lieut.  Feraud’s neck for him.  But this formula was figurative rather than precise, and expressed more a state of mind than an actual physical impulse.  At the same time, there was in that young man a feeling of comradeship and kindness which made him unwilling to make the position of Lieut.  Feraud worse than it was.  He did not want to talk at large about this wretched affair.  At the inquiry he would have, of course, to speak the truth in self-defence.  This prospect vexed him.

But no inquiry took place.  The army took the field instead.  Lieut.  D’Hubert, liberated without remark, took up his regimental duties; and Lieut.  Feraud, his arm just out of the sling, rode unquestioned with his squadron to complete his convalescence in the smoke of battlefields and the fresh air of night bivouacs.  This bracing treatment suited him so well, that at the first rumour of an armistice being signed he could turn without misgivings to the thoughts of his private warfare.